When I was younger, you either had someone or you didn't. No one wanted to be alone. It was a trope until recently, dying alone. Are internet social networks enough to replace physical relationships, or the need for one? I remember staying up to midnight as young teenages to watch the PBS Nana where it was said there would be a nude scene. There was, 5 seconds of a naked breast (as if I could see it on the low resolution TVs of that day). For most of history, the older you became the more you saw. Today, people see everything the moment they look at a computer screen, no matter what the age. This is a problem I have with my kids. I see a timeline; they don't. It's all immediate. Architecturally, all steel, glass, plastic and bare. Perhaps that is the same for every generation.
Can cities thrive in the future, disconnected from history, from tradition? I can see it if social networks and drugs are enough for humans. I come back to this poem by Yates, over and over again. Written at a similar time in history when technology had obliterated the old lifestyle. If the poem remains true, we will see violence, war and famine as bad as any in history. Whether cities or thrive or not will be hardly worth thinking about.
Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?